Education for work in the Anthropocene : the role of career education and guidance

Abstract

One of the key lifeskills, or rather set of lifeskills, that young people need in their journey towards adulthood and economic independence involves the ability to plan educational and training pathways in relation to one or more occupations of their choice. This set of lifeskills entails several competences, including the ability to access, make sense of, and use information about self and environment (e.g. training and employment opportunities, requirements, and options), the ability to make reasoned choices and effective plans that implement those choices, and the ability to manage life transitions which, in most societies, have become less linear than in the past, and more complex and unstable (Walther, 2006; Schoon & Silbereisen, 2009; Barnes et al., 2020). Such lifeskills are neatly summarised in the so-called DOTS model, which implicitly or explicitly underpins most career education programmes world-wide (Hooley et al., 2013), and which highlights competences in decision-making, opportunity awareness, transition management, and self-awareness (Law & Watts, 1993; Law, 1999).